Birger Elofs is the head of the Secret Chamber, the intelligence apparatus of the Kingdom of Peimar. A man in his late fourties, Elofs has served three different monarchs and seen quite a few battles in his day. He served as a spy during his actual military career and committed murder for the first time at the age of 19, when he drowned a Kirkoslet merchant in a river. The merchant had been passing on information to Ålannish raiders, and Elofs considered imprisonment to be too lenient a punishment.

From that day, his motto has been “Follow the laws of yourself instead of the nation’s laws.” Elofs is competent and cares about the people who work for him but at the end of the day, he knows he occasionally needs to send them to their deaths. It’s what keeps him up at night.

He is not loyal to Queen Anne per se, instead he is loyal to Peimar as a whole. Queen Anne is quite aware of this and holds Elofs in high regard despite, or maybe even because of this. They have a decent working relationship where the Queen accepts being kept out of the loop some of the time to ensure deniability. Elofs does much of the invisible security work in the royal palace and the Queen’s private manor. He is pretty much the only one who has access to the Queen around the clock.

Elofs is a workaholic who never married. He keeps his own personal affairs clandestine. When he takes time off his work with the Secret Chamber, he usually retreats to his manor outside Pike where he grows apples. His closest friends are the intelligence operatives who work in his tiny department of operations and carry out his dirty work, and the flashy Duchess Björnfara who is also a leader of the Secret Chamber.

Elofs has a few secrets he doesn’t share with almost anyone. He knows about the unnatural encroaching on the frontier and it worries him a lot, since the porous border in the North is completely unable to stop any intruders. He also knows that the Society of Polymaths has plots of their own and tries to keep them out of affairs of the state. Exposing the Polymaths as spies is a big deal, however, and Elofs will not do that as long as the Polymaths don’t do anything overly suspicious.

The goal of the Secret Chamber is to ensure the security of the kingdom. Elofs agrees on this goal. There is no law, no loyalty and no friendship that will hold him back from pursuing that goal.

So, here’s a character your future player characters might run into. Elofs can be both a patron and an enemy, depending on where the loyalties of the player characters lie. As a patron, he has information and resources he shares willingly for those working with him. As an enemy, he is about the only government official in Peimar who can actually have you killed. He’s not an unreasonable man though, since he doesn’t really carry grudges or take things personally. So, even if you end up being his enemy, he’s not going to kill you out of spite. He does things for actual reasons, and doesn’t kill people just because it’s convenient.